Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone and Yoigo, together with the Spanish NGO Protégeles, have presented last week, at the European Commission headquarters in Madrid, the mobile app “Protect childhood” for smartphones and tablets. This app will allow any user to report anonymously, in a simple and direct way, child abuse images that could be found browsing internet.
Once again, Spanish mobile operators are pioneers in Europe with this kind of initiatives, this time developing an innovative solution to accomplish the objectives set by the European Commission in the CEO’s Coalition for a better Internet for kids, recently launched by Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission.
The app, which will be downloadable free of charge in App Stores and from Protégeles’ website, directly links with the anonymous hotline promoted by the European Commission in Spain: www.protegeles.com
As soon as the complaint is received, Protégeles verifies the illegality of the content, and once confirmed, it is escalated to law enforcement agencies and to the INHOPE, the European organization that agglutinates the hotlines within the European Union and other parts of the world. The report button is part of the initiatives developed under the “Code of conduct for a safer use of mobile phones by children” signed by Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone and Yoigo on December 2007.
In February 2011, Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone and Yoigo jointly collaborated with Protégeles through the implementation of a common report button in their web sites that allowed the direct and anonymous report of child abuse material images. Nowadays, 12% of the reports received by Protégeles come directly from this button.
